#second Glass Heart propaganda post - now with pictures! | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

squish--squash · 2 years ago

Text

WHY YOU SHOULD VOTE SCAR FOR MCYTBLR SEXYMAN

I've seen people mention they want propaganda, SO I'LL GIVE THEM PROPAGANDA!

First point is this entire slideshow I made: https://www.tumblr.com/squish--squash/708473005838417920/ it mentions a good few points and I don't just wanna repeat what I've already said, so I HIGHLY suggest reading that first, bc this post is almost a continuation of it

So... why should you vote scar as the mcytblr sexyman, other than the aforementioned points? Well, I can give you many reasons!

(quick preface: aside from point 1, I'm talking about the characters, not the content creators! this will make sense of why I'm saying this on point 4...)

Scar hasn't campaigned he's in the finals. There is a chance scar will win the entire thing. AND HE HAS NOT CAMPAIGNED, OR EVEN MENTIONED IT. hell, there might be a chance he has no clue it's going on! I truly respect joe hills and their campaigning but c'mon. c'mon, you HAVE to give the tumblr sexyman crown to the guy who doesn't have a clue about the competition, it's just so fitting! AND HILARIOUS

Round 3 Round 3 was trench warfare for many contestants, scar included! we went up against TECHNOBLADE, and WON! Do y'all really wanna see the guy WHO DEFEATED TECHNOBLADE to wind up in SECOND PLACE? I know I wouldn't!

Joe Hills is too fucking cool to be a tumblr sexyman Look, if this tournament has taught me one thing, it's that joe hills is one of the coolest and most interesting people I've heard of. He's too cool, in fact. I know I prefaced this in my earlier post, but I wanted to break it down further here. Tumblr sexymen over the years have shared a vast difference of traits, but have ended up having a few qualities that are checked out by all of them. One of these traits? Being at least moderately pathetic. It's part of why they're tumblr sexymen in the first place; the people of tumblr love their blorbos to be at least a little pathetic! joe hills tho? I'm sorry but I can look in a thesaurus for antonyms of "pathetic" and it would be pictures of joe hills- JOE HILLS IS THE OPPOSITE OF PATHETIC, SHE IS SIMPLY TOO COOL

ships ahoy! smth that I've noticed in most, if not all tumblr sexymen, is that they're often shipped with either themselves and/or other people. Now, I don't know exactly how many people scar is shipped with, but I have seen him shipped with the following on this website: grian, cub, bdubs, ren, mumbo, himself (mayor!scar x captain angry eyes, on more than one occasion!!), and even during the polls I saw multiple people on my dash draw ship art of scar and schlatt during their battle. That is 7 alone, and I know there's possibility of there being a couple more out there.

villainous roles tumblr sexymen are well-known to be either canon villains or having morals that are quite gray. And scar has many villainous and/or morally gray roles. Here, I'll list some of them out! mayor!scar (lead of HEP, a villain to the mycelium resistance); captain angry eyes (villain to the hippies); wizard!scar (morally gray- he sells "magical crystals" to others that's just stained glass with 0 magical properties); hotguy & royal court!hotguy (morally gray- hotguy has shot both "villains" and regular people, and scar on the royal court was downright murderous, looking for anyone to kill for any reason, including the king)

smooth talker scar's a conman at heart (which can tie in with my previous point, actually). he's the type of guy that could talk me out of my own home and I wouldn't even be mad about it! I literally watched this man scam people out of their ARMOUR in third life. There's a reason he was able to sell those "magic crystals". And while this isn't a trait you see in all your tumblr sexymen, I think it's a trait that makes scar one of the best candidates for being mcytblr's sexyman

competent, but not too competent this ties into something I mentioned in point 3. the people of tumblr love their blorbos and sexymen to be at least a little pathetic. They also love for them to be threading the line of being both competent and incompetent. Like, these characters can draft up magnificent plans, but those plans are gonna end up failing so bad in due time because of some obvious detail they were missing. and scar is literally that character. He is 100% that guy who would land the sickest mlg-water bucket and then kill himself accidentally to something ridiculous about a minute and a half later.

you're not immune to the good times YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE. YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE. YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO THE GOOD TIMES. VOTE SCAR! VOTE SCAR! VOTE SCAR!

thank you for coming to my TED talk. now, hopefully you know what to do now (vote for scar)

#goodtimeswithscar #gtws #gtwscar #mcytblr sexymen poll #mcytblr sexyman poll #also mentioning again just in case someone did not read that linked post:#I made a post back in SEPTEMBER 2022 saying scar would be the mcyt tumblr sexyman. let apollo make my prediction come true

53 notes · View notes

niskrp · 6 years ago

Photo

:// SEARCHING OPERATIVE …

… searching for AGENT 013 / ACE OF HEARTS. classified files indicate that they go by KIM JUWON. born in YONGIN, SK, in 1992/20/02, further investigation makes it clear that they joined the agency TWO YEARS ago. they are a CLANDESTINE AGENT who specialize in LTU OPERATIONS. higher clearance is needed to access further information…

… ENTER PASSWORD TO ACCESS THE COMPLETE FILE.

:// ACCESSING BACKGROUND FILES …

tw: mention of suicide, infidelity

1992 (100 days).

kim hyunsik and his wife, nam seohyun, pose in front of the camera, slotting together in a practiced way. their eldest son, seungwon, stands in front of them, forgetting to smile in favour of peering up at the pale, pink thing in his mother’s arms. their friends and family clap nonetheless, laugh and coo at baby juwon, still oblivious to his surroundings, lavishly decorated as they are.

the kim family is picture perfect.

a flash, and the moment is gone, seohyun’s friends swarming the couple the first chance they get. she raises juwon up to meet his aunties’ eager smiles, but hyunsik knows what she really wants. he graciously plucks juwon out of her arms and the space is soon filled with a glass, champagne and bubbling.

children are supposed to be born out of love. but not even juwon, hyunsik thinks, rocking him absentmindedly, can mend the gap between him and seohyun, though she stands no more than a few feet away.

if seungwon is their firstborn, then juwon is their last resort.

2001 (9).

they’re on their second detour of the day, seungwon trailing behind an excitable juwon, only mildly irritated at the prospect of walking him home from school. it’s never just one thing with him. first, a drink, next, they’re across the city pressing their noses up against the national police university’s gates.

“why are we here again?” seungwon mutters.

“cause i wanna see the police!” juwon answers like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“they’re not police ye-”

“they’re so cooool!” juwon says a little too loudly. several students in uniform turn to look at them.

seungwon hushes him and not so subtly drags him by the backpack, ignoring his cries of i want to be just like them! the students think it’s all in good fun, looking on in amusement. seungwon sighs. “why, what’s so special about them.” his voice falls flat.

it’s after they round the corner that seungwon lets go of juwon, his brother’s pout doing little to soothe his impatience.

“they fight for justice!” and where did he learn that word? seungwon thinks.

“yeah, well, dad fights for justice, too.”

“but the police are way cooler!” a pause. “what dad does is boring.”

“whatever,” seungwon snaps, and whirls on his heel, marching towards home, where they should’ve been all along. “i’m telling him you said that,” he throws over his shoulder.

juwon freezes in horror, a split-second before he’s sprinting after him. “wait!”

2009 (17).

he goes through the night in a bit of a daze, dreamlike, disbelieving.

with his father’s recent ascension to justice of the supreme court, it’s been a string of events, one after the other. there’s just an endless stream of important people to meet, just another hand to shake, another person to smile at.

and his parents? they were certainly doing their part, talking and smiling, always smiling, father’s arm wound around mother’s waist, in her hand a sparkling glass of wine that she seemed to take endless sips from.

it’s as though the last few hours never even happened.

i know you’re having an affair, she had said, voice low and steady, abruptly ending whatever screaming match they were having just a few moments before. her mouth had wired shut after that, red lips pressed together in a taut line, the only signs of her fury present in the slight trembling of her hands.

his father had merely sighed, a quiet resignation while his two sons stood frozen in the background. he’d taken a few steps towards her, eyes darting to her arm though he didn’t dare reach out to touch her, not now. “i don’t want to make a scene, not tonight. can we talk about this later?”

and somehow, they had all piled into the car in relative peace, if not in uncomfortable silence. if the driver had noticed the tension in the air, well, it wasn’t his place to say anything.

it’s why juwon finds himself in his father’s office, the first place he’d gone to after they returned home, his mother sweeping into their shared bedroom. father still has his blazer on, eyes turned towards the floor, gaze unfocused, waiting for him to speak. there’s a hunch in his shoulders, but whether or not it’s of guilt… juwon isn’t sure.

an inhale, and he pauses, a million questions, a million answers, some that he decides he’s better off not knowing. what is there to say? what can he say? his parents had taught him to never fidget. he grips at his knees instead. “are you going to leave?”

“of course not, juwon,” his father answers automatically, and his eyes snap up, but there’s no rush, no weight to his words. “i’d never leave you or your mother.”

it’s simple, matter of fact.

“then why?”

“marriage,” his father begins, and leans backwards in his chair, “is more than a union of two people. it’s a merging of families. what we have… what your mother and i share,” he corrects, “is more than being husband and wife.”

his father finally stands and makes his way towards juwon. he stops next to him, claps a heavy hand to his shoulder. juwon meets his eyes.

“i have to a duty to your mother, and to you, and to seungwon,” he says slowly, “but we fell out of love a long time ago. i hope you can learn to understand that.” his father is quiet when he finishes, honest in his words, but not pleading. simple.

to understand… in time, he thinks he will. because this is the world they live in.

what other choice does he have?

“i forgive you,” juwon says, and he does.

a wry smile is all he gets in return.

2010 (18).

he does his duty to the nation, and to his parents, though perhaps not in the way they’d expected. after highschool was graduation, and with it came enrollment into the korean national police university.

it wasn’t ku or snu or even yonsei, but it was still a degree, juwon had pointed out.

my children should be able to do what they like, is the only thing his father said with a smile, his mother turning to him helplessly.

within reason, she argued.

in the end, no one, not even nam seohyun’s circle of friends, and certainly not his father’s circle of justices could say anything bad about a police officer. it was simply in bad taste.

and so juwon stays in his hometown of yongin, where knpu had always been, where his dreams, if he could call them that, had always been. he breezes through post-secondary with less friction than he’d anticipated.

2014 (22).

his parents will take any opportunity to brag, just as all parents do, just one more thing they can laud over each other, and his graduation to inspector is no exception. they make him attend a party in full uniform, his peers are all in business but they rove their eyes over him all the same, suggestive whispers of officer drifting around him like smoke.

it’s quiet after that, not by choice but by necessity. he begins his fieldwork immediately, rotating every few months into a new line of work: investigation, patrol, riot policing, they’re meant to get a taste of it all. he doesn’t have time to get on his knees, schmooze the chairman of so-and-so, beg for praise, acceptance. he’s better than that.

or at least he thinks he is.

if there’s one thing that juwon learns, it’s that everyone is out for themselves.

whether they’re wearing a suit in a conference room or pressed down to the dirt with juwon’s boot on their back, people are all the same.

juwon adjusts accordingly.

2016 (24).

an unexpected attachment to the narcotics department derails his plans for next decade or so of his life, or perhaps for the rest of it, looking back now.

it’s routine at first, until it’s not. it’s routine for the sake of routine, for painting a picture of someone he’s not—officially, it’s called undercover work.

you’re not playing a role, they’d told him, you’re playing a different version of yourself. truth is a matter of circumstance, juwon surmises. truth is convenience, lies are of omission.

his dreams of becoming a detective are lost somewhere along the way.

he’s simply too good at what he does: lying and manipulation, lying to maintain the lie. he’s more useful where he is, though he can’t quite find the pride to support his superiors’ praise.

he stays all the same.

2017 (25).

he accepts a transfer to the nis without much thought, commendation, recommendation, doesn’t consider the new weight placed upon his shoulders—it’s all the same, anyways. anonymous dedication to freedom and truth, our nation will count on you, those who exist these gates—he’s a cog in the machine, like all the rest. national police, national intelligence, organizations meant to inspire pride in the populace, but it’s all propaganda. nothing he does will ever change the world, no matter how many lives he ruins, no matter how many people he puts behind bars, it’s all the same.

but the results he gets are enough. he completes the st program with ease.

2018 (26)

he’s a newly minted agent, and quickly becomes water under the bridge. long time undercover operations where juwon ceases to exist, if it comes down to it, we’ll disavow any knowledge—he’s used to the feeling of drowning.

“kim juwon.” one of the higher ups, he recognizes, greets him on the way to his debriefing. “welcome home. and good fucking work.”

but he fights to stay afloat.

juwon merely bows in response, doesn’t bother with a thank you, sir—the man is already moving on before juwon can even raise his head—people like him only cared about results, no matter the cost.

the results being the dismantling and subsequent arrest of a gang with a large stake in the distribution of cocaine—he’s just come back from the south, his first assignment, totaling five months. it was slow work, like most undercover ops are, establishment of identity, trust, or at least the lowering of suspicion, bridging the gap between us vs. them. until he had found a sort of diamond in the rough: a man desperate enough to get caught in the affairs of the gang, threatened to be their dealer.

it’s a fact that juwon had exploited mercilessly, preying on his vulnerability, working his way into his confidence until he had found his way in. it was quick to unravel, after that.

so when the man is put on minute-to-minute watch, in case of suicide, juwon knows for a fact that it’s his fault.

“how so?” the prison guard had asked when juwon told him as much.

“i was supposed to be his only friend in the world.” juwon stares at the man curled on his cot from a monitor. “i made him trust me. and i betrayed him.”

“he’d be better off dead,” juwon mutters.

“yeah, well, that’s not for us to decide.” a beat. “only for us to carry out.” the guard sends juwon a cheeky grin.

juwon can’t help but bark out a laugh, shaking his head at the irony of it all.

“see you later, man.”

“yeah.” juwon takes one last glance at the broken man on the monitor. “see you.”

and he leaves it all behind him.

postscript.

“that can’t have been easy.”

“no.” juwon keeps his head lolled back against the plush armchair, stares up at the white of the ceiling. “it’s scary just how easy it was.”

:// ACCESSING PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION …

outward: comfortable with teamwork, not by nature but by design. police academy made sure of that. though not much of a team-player himself, juwon will be the first to kick everyone’s ass into gear, growling into their faces about wasting time and the like. he recognizes the need for team-oriented exercises, the building of interpersonal skills,but to be honest, he’s glad he spends most of his time as an ltu operative alone. beyond that, he can follow orders just fine. along the same lines, tends to keep to himself, likes to watch rather than be watched. observant but also intuitive, sensitive to other’s feelings, but most of the time maintains that it’s none of his business. friendly enough to grab a drink with, takes things lightly, an easy smile playing on his lips. in his line of work, it’s necessary to be able to hold a conversation. though only when he wants to.

inward: cynical and disillusioned view of the world. privately believes that his work, the work of the nis, the police, it’s all futile unless a large scale reform is carried out, which it never will be. on the day-to-day, he’s making a difference, sure, but nothing is really changing. to add to that, recognizes that people are selfish, uses that reasoning to maintain his own selfishness. love, family, relationships, none of it is genuine, it’s simply a business model.

… END OF FILE. CONTACT THE AGENT DIRECTLY FOR MORE.

#t #c #013

0 notes

cleopatrarps · 7 years ago

Text

Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning From Its Own History of Hate

BERLIN — Security is tight at this brick building on the western edge of Berlin. Inside, a sign warns: “Everybody without a badge is a potential spy!”

Spread over five floors, hundreds of men and women sit in rows of six scanning their computer screens. All have signed nondisclosure agreements. Four trauma specialists are at their disposal seven days a week.

They are the agents of Facebook. And they have the power to decide what is free speech and what is hate speech.

This is a deletion center, one of Facebook’s largest, with more than 1,200 content moderators. They are cleaning up content — from terrorist propaganda to Nazi symbols to child abuse — that violates the law or the company’s community standards.

Germany, home to a tough new online hate speech law, has become a laboratory for one of the most pressing issues for governments today: how and whether to regulate the world’s biggest social network.

Around the world, Facebook and other social networking platforms are facing a backlash over their failures to safeguard privacy, disinformation campaigns and the digital reach of hate groups.

In India, seven people were beaten to death after a false viral message on the Facebook subsidiary WhatsApp. In Myanmar, violence against the Rohingya minority was fueled, in part, by misinformation spread on Facebook. In the United States, Congress called Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to testify about the company’s inability to protect its users’ privacy.

As the world confronts these rising forces, Europe, and Germany in particular, have emerged as the de facto regulators of the industry, exerting influence beyond their own borders. Berlin’s digital crackdown on hate speech, which took effect on Jan. 1, is being closely watched by other countries. And German officials are playing a major role behind one of Europe’s most aggressive moves to rein in technology companies, strict data privacy rules that take effect across the European Union on May 25 and are prompting global changes.

“For them, data is the raw material that makes them money,” said Gerd Billen, secretary of state in Germany’s Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection. “For us, data protection is a fundamental right that underpins our democratic institutions.”

Germany’s troubled history has placed it on the front line of a modern tug-of-war between democracies and digital platforms.

In the country of the Holocaust, the commitment against hate speech is as fierce as the commitment to free speech. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is only available in an annotated version. Swastikas are illegal. Inciting hatred is punishable by up to five years in jail.

But banned posts, pictures and videos have routinely lingered on Facebook and other social media platforms. Now companies that systematically fail to remove “obviously illegal” content within 24 hours face fines of up to 50 million euros.

The deletion center predates the legislation, but its efforts have taken on new urgency. Every day content moderators in Berlin, hired by a third-party firm and working exclusively on Facebook, pore over thousands of posts flagged by users as upsetting or potentially illegal and make a judgment: Ignore, delete or, in particularly tricky cases, “escalate” to a global team of Facebook lawyers with expertise in German regulation.

Some decisions to delete are easy. Posts about Holocaust denial and genocidal rants against particular groups like refugees are obvious ones for taking down.

Others are less so. On Dec. 31, the day before the new law took effect, a far-right lawmaker reacted to an Arabic New Year’s tweet from the Cologne police, accusing them of appeasing “barbaric, Muslim, gang-raping groups of men.”

The request to block a screenshot of the lawmaker’s post wound up in the queue of Nils, a 35-year-old agent in the Berlin deletion center. His judgment was to let it stand. A colleague thought it should come down. Ultimately, the post was sent to lawyers in Dublin, London, Silicon Valley and Hamburg. By the afternoon it had been deleted, prompting a storm of criticism about the new legislation, known here as the “Facebook Law.”

“A lot of stuff is clear-cut,” Nils said. Facebook, citing his safety, did not allow him to give his surname. “But then there is the borderline stuff.”

Complicated cases have raised concerns that the threat of the new rules’ steep fines and 24-hour window for making decisions encourage “over-blocking” by companies, a sort of defensive censorship of content that is not actually illegal.

The far-right Alternative of Germany, a noisy and prolific user of social media, has been quick to proclaim “the end of free speech.” Human rights organizations have warned that the legislation was inspiring authoritarian governments to copy it.

Other people argue that the law simply gives a private company too much authority to decide what constitutes illegal hate speech in a democracy, an argument that Facebook, which favored voluntary guidelines, made against the law.

“It is perfectly appropriate for the German government to set standards,” said Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy. “But we think it’s a bad idea for the German government to outsource the decision of what is lawful and what is not.”

Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president for public policy in Europe and the leader of the company’s lobbying effort against the German legislation, put it more simply: “We don’t want to be the arbiters of free speech.”

German officials counter that social media platforms are the arbiters anyway.

It all boils down to one question, said Mr. Billen, who helped draw up the new legislation: “Who is sovereign? Parliament or Facebook?”

Learning From (German) History

When Nils applied for a job at the deletion center, the first question the recruiter asked him was: “Do you know what you will see here?”

Nils has seen it all. Child torture. Mutilations. Suicides. Even murder: He once saw a video of a man cutting a heart out of a living human being.

And then there is hate.

“You see all the ugliness of the world here,” Nils said. “Everyone is against everyone else. Everyone is complaining about that other group. And everyone is saying the same horrible things.”

The issue is deeply personal for Nils. He has a 4-year-old daughter. “I’m also doing this for her,” he said.

The center here is run by Arvato, a German service provider owned by the conglomerate Bertelsmann. The agents have a broad purview, reviewing content from a half-dozen countries. Those with a focus on Germany must know Facebook’s community standards and, as of January, the basics of German hate speech and defamation law.

“Two agents looking at the same post should come up with the same decision,” says Karsten König, who manages Arvato’s partnership with Facebook.

The Berlin center opened with 200 employees in 2015, as Germany was opening its doors to hundreds of thousands of migrants.

That year a selfie went viral.

Anas Modamani, a Syrian refugee, posed with Chancellor Angela Merkel and posted the image on Facebook. It instantly became a symbol of her decision to allowing in hundreds of thousands of migrants.

Soon it also became a symbol of the backlash.

The image showed up in false reports linking Mr. Modamani to terrorist attacks in Brussels and on a Christmas market in Berlin. He sought an injunction against Facebook to stop such posts from being shared but eventually lost.

The arrival of nearly 1.4 million migrants in Germany has tested the country’s resolve to keep a tight lid on hate speech. The law on illegal speech was long-established but enforcement in the digital realm was scattershot before the new legislation.

Posts calling refugees rapists, Neanderthals and scum survived for weeks, according to jugendschutz.net, a publicly funded internet safety organization. Many were never taken down. Researchers at jugendschutz.net reported a tripling in observed hate speech in the second half of 2015.

Mr. Billen, the secretary of state in charge of the new law, was alarmed. In September 2015, he convened executives from Facebook and other social media sites at the justice ministry, a building that was once the epicenter of state propaganda for the Communist East. A task force for fighting hate speech was created. A couple of months later, Facebook and other companies signed a joint declaration, promising to “examine flagged content and block or delete the majority of illegal posts within 24 hours.”

But the problem did not go away. Over the 15 months that followed, independent researchers, hired by the government, twice posed as ordinary users and flagged illegal hate speech. During the tests, they found that Facebook had deleted 46 percent and 39 percent.

“They knew that they were a platform for criminal behavior and for calls to commit criminal acts, but they presented themselves to us as a wolf in sheep skin,” said Mr. Billen, a poker-faced civil servant with stern black frames on his glasses.

By March 2017, the German government had lost patience and started drafting legislation. The Network Enforcement Law was born, setting out 21 types of content that are “manifestly illegal” and requiring social media platforms to act quickly.

Officials say early indications suggest the rules have served their purpose. Facebook’s performance on removing illegal hate speech in Germany rose to 100 percent over the past year, according to the latest spot check of the European Union.

Platforms must publish biannual reports on their efforts. The first is expected in July.

At Facebook’s Berlin offices, Mr. Allan acknowledged that under the earlier voluntary agreement, the company had not acted decisively enough at first.

“It was too little and it was too slow,” he said. But, he added, “that has changed.”

He cited another independent report for the European Commission from last summer that showed Facebook was by then removing 80 percent of hate speech posts in Germany.

The reason for the improvement was not German legislation, he said, but a voluntary code of conduct with the European Union. Facebook’s results have improved in all European countries, not just in Germany, Mr. Allan said.

“There was no need for legislation,” he said.

Mr. Billen disagrees.

“They could have prevented the law,” he said. YouTube scored 90 percent in last year’s monitoring exercise. If other platforms had done the same, there would be no law today, he said.

A Regulatory Dilemma

Germany’s hard-line approach to hate speech and data privacy once made it an outlier in Europe. The country’s stance is now more mainstream, an evolution seen in the justice commissioner in Brussels.

Vera Jourova, the justice commissioner, deleted her Facebook account in 2015 because she could not stand the hate anymore.

“It felt good,” she said about pressing the button. She added: “It felt like taking back control.”

But Ms. Jourova, who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in what is now the Czech Republic, had long been skeptical about governments legislating any aspect of free speech, including hate speech. Her father lost his job after making a disparaging comment about the Soviet invasion in 1968, barring her from going to university until she married and took her husband’s name.

“I lived half my life in the atmosphere driven by Soviet propaganda,” she said. “The golden principle was: If you repeat a lie a hundred times it becomes the truth.”

When Germany started considering a law, she instead preferred a voluntary code of conduct. In 2016, platforms like Facebook promised European users easy reporting tools and committed to removing most illegal posts brought to their attention within 24 hours.

The approach worked well enough, Ms. Jourova said. It was also the quickest way to act because the 28 member states in the European Union differed so much about whether and how to legislate.

But the stance of many governments toward Facebook has hardened since it emerged that the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of up to 87 million users. Representatives of the European Parliament have asked Mr. Zuckerberg to come to Brussels to “clarify issues related to the use of personal data” and he has agreed to come as soon as next week.

Ms. Jourova, whose job is to protect the data of over 500 million Europeans, has hardened her stance as well.

“Our current system relies on trust and this did nothing to improve trust,” she said. “The question now is how do we continue?”

The European Commission is considering German-style legislation for online content related to terrorism, violent extremism and child pornography, including a provision that would include fines for platforms that did not remove illegal content within an hour of being alerted to it.

Several countries — France, Israel, Italy, and Canada among them — have sent queries to the German government about the impact of the new hate speech law.

And Germany’s influence is evident in Europe’s new privacy regulation, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R.. The rules give people control over how their information is collected and used.

[Here’s what G.D.P.R. means for you, and the internet.]

Inspired in part by German data protection laws written in the 1980s, the regulation has been shaped by a number of prominent Germans. Ms. Jourova’s chief of staff, Renate Nikolay, is German, as is her predecessor’s chief of staff, Martin Selmayr, now the European Commission’s secretary general. The lawmaker in charge of the regulation in the European Parliament is German, too.

“We have built on the German tradition of data protection as a constitutional right and created the most modern piece of regulation of the digital economy,” Ms. Nikolay said.

“To succeed in the long-term companies needs the trust of customers,” she said. “At the latest since Cambridge Analytica it has become clear that data protection is not just some nutty European idea, but a matter of competitiveness.”

On March 26, Ms. Jourova wrote a letter — by post, not email — to Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer.

“Is there a need for stricter rules for platforms like those that exist for traditional media?” she asked.

“Is the data of Europeans affected by the current scandal?” she added, referring to the Cambridge Analytica episode. And, if so, “How do you plan to inform the user about this?”

She demanded a reply within two weeks, and she got one. Some 2.7 million Europeans were affected, Ms. Sandberg wrote.

But she never answered Ms. Jourova’s question on regulation.

“There is now a sense of urgency and the conviction that we are dealing with something very dangerous that may threaten the development of free democracies,” said Ms. Jourova, who is also trying to find ways to clamp down on fake news and disinformation campaigns.

“We want the tech giants to respect and follow our legislation,” she added. “We want them to show social responsibility both on data protection and on hate speech.”

So do many Facebook employees, Mr. Allan, the company executive, said.

“We employ very thoughtful and principled people,” he said. “They work here because they want to make the world a better place, so when an assumption is made that the product they work on is harming people it is impactful.”

“People have felt this criticism very deeply,” he said.

A Visual Onslaught

Nils works eight-hour shifts. On busy days, 1,500 user reports are in his queue. Other days, there are only 300. Some of his colleagues have nightmares about what they see.

Every so often someone breaks down. A mother recently left her desk in tears after watching a video of a child being sexually abused. A young man felt physically sick after seeing a video of a dog being tortured. The agents watch teenagers self-mutilating and girls recounting rape.

They have weekly group sessions with a psychologist and the trauma specialists on standby. In more serious cases, the center teams up with clinics in Berlin.

In the office, which is adorned with Facebook logos, fresh fruit is at the agents’ disposal in a small room where subdued colors and decorative moss growing on the walls are meant to calm fraying nerves.

To decompress, the agents sometimes report each other’s posts, not because they are controversial, but “just for a laugh,” said another agent, the son of a Lebanese refugee and an Arabic-speaker who has had to deal with content related to terrorism generally and the Islamic State specifically. By now, he said, images of “weird skin diseases” affected him more than those of a beheading. Nils finds sports injuries like breaking bones particularly disturbing.

There is a camaraderie in the office and a real sense of mission: Nils said the agents were proud to “help clean up the hate.”

The definition of hate is constantly evolving.

The agents, who initially take a three-week training course, get frequent refreshers. Their guidelines are revised to reflect hate speech culture. Events change the meaning of words. New hashtags and online trends must be put in context.

“Slurs can become socialized,” Mr. Allan of Facebook explained.

“Refugee” became a group protected from the broad hate speech rules only in 2015. “Nafri” was a term used by the German police that year to describe North Africans who sexually harassed hundreds of women, attacking and, in some cases, raping them. Since then, Nafri has become a popular insult among the far-right.

Nils and his colleagues must determine whether hateful content is singling out an ethnic group or individuals.

That was the challenge with a message on Twitter that was later posted to Facebook as a screenshot by Beatrix von Storch, deputy floor leader of the far-right party, AfD.

“What the hell is wrong with this country?” Ms. von Storch wrote on Dec. 31. “Why is an official police account tweeting in Arabic?”

“Do you think that will appease the barbaric murdering Muslim group-raping gangs of men?” she continued.

A user reported the post as a violation of German law, and it landed in Nils’s queue. He initially decided to ignore the request because he felt Ms. von Storch was directing her insults at the men who had sexually assaulted women two years earlier.

Separately, a user reported the post as a violation of community standards. Another agent leaned toward deleting it, taking it as directed at Muslims in general.

They conferred with their “subject matter expert,” who escalated it to a team in Dublin.

For 24 hours, the post kept Facebook lawyers from Silicon Valley to Hamburg busy. The Dublin team decided that the post did not violate community standards but sent it on for legal assessment by outside lawyers hired by Facebook in Germany.

Within hours of news that the German police were opening a criminal investigation into Ms. von Storch over her comments, Facebook restricted access to the post. The user who reported the content was notified that it had been blocked for a violation of section 130 of the German criminal code, incitement to hatred. Ms. von Storch was also notified too.

In the first few days of the year, it looked like the platforms were erring on the side of censorship. On Jan. 2, a day after Ms. von Storch’s post was deleted, the satirical magazine Titanic quipped that she would be its new guest tweeter. Two of the magazine’s subsequent Twitter posts mocking her were deleted. When Titanic published them again, its account was temporarily suspended.

Since then, things have calmed down. And even Mr. Allan conceded: “The law has not materially changed the amount of content that is deleted.”

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

The post Germany Acts to Tame Facebook, Learning From Its Own History of Hate appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2LegVfa via News of World

#Daily World News #Daily Entertainment #Daily Sports #Today News #World The News

0 notes

dani-qrt · 7 years ago